Want to try a lightweight GNU/Linux distro (or any distro) for yourself without installing one to a hard drive or flash drive or burning it to a CD? Check out this post from guest writer puppycat, who just started a new blog over at Lex Linux. It tell you how to install and use UNetbootin, discusses why its better than using a virtual machine, provides a couple options for running a virtual machine anyway, and mentions how to tweak start up once your experimenting has resulted in a new distro you want to use as your main system.
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There’s a great way to play with Linux distros without installing them to a hard drive, a flash drive or burning them to a CD. If you are running Windows XP, download UNetbootin, install and run it, selecting the .iso you want to test. UNetbootin will create a folder in C:\ and re-write a couple startup files (including C:\boot.ini). Upon restart UNetbootin will launch Grub4Dos which can boot from the .iso image file you selected. There’s no formatting, installing or partitioning. It just works. When you’re done test driving your Linux distro and upon rebooting back into XP, UNetbootin will ask if you want to uninstall it, a handy reminder if you’re using a public computer or a friend’s machine and don’t want to leave any software behind.
For taking a distro out for a spin, I prefer using UNetbootin over a virtual machine. Virtual machines still suffer from an inability to dedicate all system resources to the guest OS, so being able to boot into the Linux distro you want to try will give you a better feeling for their actual performance, especially if you are using an older machine. The only disadvantage between of UNetbootin compared with a virtual machine is the series of two boot cycles required for UNetbootin, unless you want to be impolite and skip the second boot required to uninstall. In my opinion, the performance boost gained from avoiding a virtual machine (QEMU) is well worth rebooting with UNetbootin and then rebooting to uninstall it from XP.
Both virtual machines and UNetbootin are advantageous to a full install or a live CD/USB because they are post-BIOS grabs of machine resources. I love the idea of booting directly from a USB stick or from a mini-CD (you can easily fit Puppy on an 8cm, 210 MB mini-disc – I use a mini-CD-RW so I can keep up-to-date on the new releases of Puppy 4.20). But when I’m on campus (and in plenty of other locations, I imagine), there’s a BIOS password that prevents me from changing the boot order and de-prioritizing the hard drive. That’s where virtual machines and Unetbootin are helpful. If the computer you’re using does not allow the option of booting from a peripheral device, then you can either use a virtual machine or you can temporarily re-write the post-BIOS boot sequence (Unetbootin) to use your preferred Linux.
While UNetbootin has many other features and does not only run on XP, my guess is that many folks who are interested in exposing themselves to Linux but are not yet ready to commit to a full install are probably running XP and could benefit from UNetbootin’s small footprint, easy install/uninstall cycle, and its ability to boot from an .iso. I’ve heard folks criticize this method as being a timid approach to exploring Linux. So be it. If it exposes someone to Linux who otherwise would not have bothered for fear of reformatting, partitioning or installing, then a good deed has been done.
If you really want to try a virtual machine instead of UNetbootin, I recommend a couple options:
- VirtualBox: If the primary goal is experimenting with different flavors of linux without rebooting and with performance that most closely reflects a real install, a live cd image seems to run best under VirtualBox. The user manual is thorough yet not intimidating and the initial install and set-up was a breeze. I have not benchmarked performance but booting SliTaz through VirtualBox felt much faster than through QEMU (even with the KQEMU accelerator running). Unpacking initramfs, normally a bottleneck during boot, was extremely fast.
- QEMU: In my experience, QEMU runs much better with the KQEMU accelerator installed on the host machine and I consequently keep the installer on my flash drive, installing KQEMU on any computer within which I want to run Linux via QEMU. QEMU is nice because you don’t have to install anything to the host OS, and you can just write a little batch file to launch each .iso on your hard drive/flash drive/cd. If anyone as a tip for improving QEMU’s performance, please feel free to share in the comments.
If you find a Linux distro you like, you can still retain the flexibility of UNetbootin while gaining the advantages of a faster boot time by automatically starting into the distro of your choice. I personally run Puppy 4.1.2, lauded elsewhere on this blog, on a Dell C400 (1.2GHz PIII, 1 GB RAM). I have XP squished onto a 6 GB partition (C:\ in XP, /mnt/sda1 in Puppy) and have my Puppy .sfs files (pup_412.sfs, devx_412.sfs, openoffice-3.0.0_412.sfs, pup_save.2fs) on my data partition (the D:\ drive in XP, which automounts at /mnt/home in Puppy because that’s where the pup_save.2fs file is located). After I installed UNetbootin in XP, I rewrote C:\boot.ini, changing the default OS from XP to UNetbootin and dropping the timer to 0 seconds. I then dropped the Grub4Dos timer to 0 seconds (located in C:\unetbtin\menu.lst) and can boot Puppy in 55 seconds flat, bypassing XP without having reformatted the Windows MBR or having installed GRUB. (I’m not opposed to doing either of those, by the way, but I have found Grub4Dos to meet my needs just as well as GRUB.) It’s now super easy to play with all sorts of Linux distros. All I have to do is change the initial timeout in “/mnt/sda1/boot.ini” from 0 to something reasonable (5 seconds or so) while in Puppy, reboot into XP, and re-run UNetbootin to launch SliTaz, Damn Small Linux, or even the Fedora Core live CD. Running a live CD .iso from your hard drive is significantly faster than running it from a CD and for a fellow like me who doesn’t have a CD drive, it’s the perfect solution.
